2021/12/01 by Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Saeed, Mohammad Hammas, Shiza Ali +9 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computer science #Correctness #Data science #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Law #Literature #Media Influence and Politics #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Narrative #Political science #Politics #Set (abstract data type) #Social media #State (computer science) #cs.CR #cs.CY #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.00443
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
arxiv created 2021/12/01 · openalex publication_date 2021/12/01 · arxiv updated 2021/12/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Growing evidence points to recurring influence campaigns on social media, often sponsored by state actors aiming to manipulate public opinion on sensitive political topics. Typically, campaigns are performed through instrumented accounts, known as troll accounts; despite their prominence, however, little work has been done to detect these accounts in the wild. In this paper, we present TROLLMAGNIFIER, a detection system for troll accounts. Our key observation, based on analysis of known Russian-sponsored troll accounts identified by Reddit, is that they show loose coordination, often interacting with each other to further specific narratives. Therefore, troll accounts controlled by the same actor often show similarities that can be leveraged for detection. TROLLMAGNIFIER learns the typical behavior of known troll accounts and identifies more that behave similarly. We train TROLLMAGNIFIER on a set of 335 known troll accounts and run it on a large dataset of Reddit accounts. Our system identifies 1,248 potential troll accounts; we then provide a multi-faceted analysis to corroborate the correctness of our classification. In particular, 66% of the detected accounts show signs of being instrumented by malicious actors (e.g., they were created on the same exact day as a known troll, they have since been suspended by Reddit, etc.). They also discuss similar topics as the known troll accounts and exhibit temporal synchronization in their activity. Overall, we show that using TROLLMAGNIFIER, one can grow the initial knowledge of potential trolls provided by Reddit by over 300%.